What if an unvaccinated (by personal choice) person comes down with COVID and has to be hospitalized or - worse - put into ICU. Do you think they would be OK if doctors, faced with the crunch of beds, place them into a second tier, behind all the breakthrough cases? Hospitals do not do that currently, but this is not unheard of (e.g. bumping smokers and alcoholic patients in organ donation queues).
I am willing to accept this is a personal choice if people making that choice accept responsibility for it.
Let's make it a little more topical: Both people were told not to play with the gun and that there were insufficient ICU beds. The first person still played with the gun and shot himself and another person. This was a personal choice he made. His luck was against him (and the person he shot).
Let's make it more topical still: The two people were told, "Look, we know you want to play with guns. We really don't want you to. Receiving treatment for gunshot wounds is less likely to lead to long life than simply not getting shot, and we have other illnesses we need to treat. Here's an additional incentive: if we don't have sufficient medical resources to treat everyone, the people who ignore this warning will get treated after those who don't." Yes, this is coercion, inasmuch as it is influencing their decision, but under this definition of coercion, coercion hardly seems like something to worry about, certainly not as much as getting shot.
Should vaccine refusal then result in increased premiums, or increased coinsurance for covid-related care? How many people would make the choice if they had to bear even part of the expected value of their increased medical costs themselves?
Although I don't know of any insurance companies that have rates for people that have not undergone certain medical procedures. That sounds unethical to me.
Personal choice goes against that, because many people's personal choices will be selfish or convenient to them while putting other people in harm's way. Within a large society, we must be cognizant of the likely impact of our decisions, but history shows that most people will not do so, and therefore must be compelled, legally, to take actions which are for the best of society.
Some freedom is defined and assigned at the federal, not personal level, with the goal of ensuring the national survives existential challenges (of which COVID may be one).
That's one philosophy of governance. I believe it to be fundamentally incorrect. But that's your philosophy and your view on this topic stems from that. I get your point, I just disagree wholeheartedly.
I have a right to be selfish. I owe no obligation to anyone else that I have not voluntarily entered into. If you want to redefine "putting other people in harms way" to include breathing the air around me without getting a medical procedure you can, but it is wrong IMO.
We aren't talking about how things are, we are talking about how things should be, specifically, whether there should be vaccine mandates or not. Other existing violations of rights are wrong also.
So it is fundamentally about philosophy of governance. You believe society should come first, individuals can be compelled to benefit society even potentially at great cost to themselves, and that a person is morally wrong for not wanting to go along with that. I believe that it is morally wrong to expect a person to value anyone over themselves that they have not chosen to, or to be compelled to do anything on behalf of someone else.